WordPress Too Slow? Speed It Up

WordPress is primarily a blogger’s cup of tea. Apparently, it seems to have extended its reach to different business chunks. There’s actually a lot one can do with WordPress, like creating a blog/ wrebsite, for personal as well professional means. All goes well, till your blog works smooth and doesn’t trip or stop or gets slow whilst. Because when it starts showing such signs, it’s kind of gross to use.

Site speed worries me the most, more than the content itself. Now, the reason why I put site speed over content is because no one has a chance to look at the content if the site doesn’t load quickly. People might walk over or probably withdraw their session on your very own site. That’s what bothers me. If I look at the other side and not worry about abandoned session(s), I am getting beaten at the SEO aspect. Need I say more?

Now, if something drew you in here, I’m sure you very well understand the cruciality of a site’s speed and how decisive it could be? All your marketing efforts could go in vein, worsening the traffic, and thereby sales, just because of the speed culprit.

Well, let’s move further to look into the matter. The first thing probably anyone would do when the site is on a low, i.e. when the site doesn’t load on time, is go to the root and try to analyze the most prominent cause for it. I’m listing 5 points here for you to know how to analyze your site’s or WordPress speed. This applies to all WordPress blogs/ sites.

1. Know What’s Wrong With Your Site

It’s a tough nut, literally. Not that easy to analyze the site’s speed. Numerous reasons could be there. A speed test service, however might declare that your site takes approximately 1.40 seconds to load, doesn’t mean it actually does. Fluctuations may be expected, that too huge ones at times. To get a hint of your WordPress blog’s speed, pay heed to the following pointers:

Don’t worry about the time your site takes to load on your computer, unless you are doing it from a target audience’s location.

Work with quality services and run your site on different places at different times to depict the time it takes to come up. Try testing from your target audience’s place.

2. Go for a Custom Theme

You don’t want your WordPress blog to look stale, would you? Go, choose a theme. But, don’t just choose any other theme for your blog. Mostly, free themes don’t offer you the speed you want. A premium or a custom one would work much better. Design one for yourself if you could. Don’t fall trap to the free ones anymore. If you can’t do that, you could settle for a free one, but then you got to customize it according to your needs to optimize it perfectly for the blog’s speed.

3. Identify the Right Host

WordPress needs some beef to run, not literally though. However, the more you put in, the faster it runs, in terms of host capacity.

Let’s talk in a more factual manner. WordPress needs resources on the hosting server in terms of memory and CPU. At times, when resources don’t fulfill its need, which happens mostly in the case of shared hosting, your WordPress site/ blog suffers. If you happen to be the one suffering due to this, you must upgrade your hosting account.

It’s just a matter of an hour or two to switch a WordPress blog to another host. You could consider the following before moving to another host –

Choose the best one. How would you find if it’s the best? Look for online reviews and research it yourself.

The reason why I didn’t mention any specific hosting companies here, is because you could be your own master while doing that. Consider your company’s requirements before you pick any. But we can recommend the hosting PelFusion is using that is HostGator

4. Limit the Use of External Scripts

No matter what web host you use, use of external scripts can hugely hamper your WordPress site’s speed. Don’t fall for embedding too much of them. I’m not saying, don’t use them. I’m just saying, use whichever are necessary for your site, such as those of Facebook, Alexa, Google Analytics, etc. Actually, you can get your priorities straight, as in which one would you prefer, speed or more features.

5. Caching Plugins Increase Speed

Caching plugins can contribute to increase your WordPress site’s speed by more than 10x. Some of them can even do better. Plugins like W3 Total Cache do it pretty well.Website’s like Mashable use this plugin for enormous blog speed. You can do it too for your WordPress blog. It’s no rocket science. Simple plugins like these make life easy.

And I am not finished yet. There’s a couple more..

6. Homepage refreshment (optimization)

Sometimes, you do small things for your homepage and it reciprocates by not slowing down. For example, you could start with highlighting excerpts from the post, instead of the entire post. Follow it with bringing down the number of posts shown on the home page. Let’s say, show 5 posts at a time.

What else, get rid of useless and inactive plugins and widgets to make room for a cleaner and faster homepage.

7. Get Your WordPress Database Optimized

Well, again I’ll use the term ‘optimize’, because that’s what gets you to work. In this case, usually the ‘WP- Optimize’ plugin helps to do the job required. Your database gets afresh. And your WordPress works quick, which is ultimately what you want, and which is why you spent time reading this one.

And that’s it. Hope these things would have helped you get it all on track. On a personal level, I have tried these things and they actually worked.

But, did these work for you? Did you try any other method to speed up your WordPress blog? If yes, I would like to be fed. Do chime in with your thoughts and let us all share our own tweaks..